The first readers of the entire manuscript were Michael Hagemeister and Anne Hartmann. I am endlessly grateful for their comments and suggestions and can only hope that the result does not disappoint them. I found the assistance of Oksana Bulgakova and Dietmar Hochmuth extremely valuable, and felt particularly grateful to them for not only sharing with me their uniquely intimate knowledge of the history of Soviet film but also telling me about cinematic rarities without which my account would have been significantly the poorer. I wish to thank Professor Sebastian Lentz and Dr Konrad Großer of the Leibniz Institut für Länderkunde in Leipzig for their marvellous achievement in producing the maps that are so essential to enable the reader to picture the space in which the events described took place. Heidrun Hotzan, Jan Musekamp, Charlotte Steinke and Markus Wolf, my colleagues at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder, deserve much of the credit for converting my manuscript into a text that could be submitted to the publishers. I should like to express my gratitude to them for their thorough and conscientious work. As in previous years, Tobias Heyl at Hanser Verlag was a dependable guide during the production of the book. I am grateful to Michael Krüger, the publisher, for his over-generous confidence in me. He managed to disperse my anxieties that this time I might not possess the stamina needed to bring this project to a timely conclusion. I must thank my wife, Sonja Margolina, for having borne the stress associated with this journey to the end of the night for so long and with such patience.
Needless to say, the author retains the responsibility for any shortcomings that have survived in the text despite his very best efforts.
Reproduction Acknowledgements
The map reprinted in the front and back inside cover: the Leibniz Institut für Länderkunde, Leipzig. All rights reserved.
Author’s own collection: figures 13.1, 29.3 and 36.1.
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2008: figures 2.1, 2.2, 4.1, 6.1, 19.3 and 34.1.
Bolshaia sovetskaia entsiklopediya (Moscow, 1938): the maps in the end-papers have been taken from the plan of Moscow of 1937 and also the illustrations figures 17.1 and 17.2.
Butovskii poligon 1937: kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii, no. 4 (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Alzo, 2004): figure 30.1.
Butovskii poligon 1937: kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii, no. 8 (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Alzo, 2004): figures 18.2, 33.1, 33.2–33.5 and 36.3.
Chase, William J., Enemies Within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2001): figure 26.1.
Deineka, Aleksandr, Paintings, Graphic Works, Sculptures, Mosaics: Excerpts from the Artist’s Writings (Leningrad, 1982): figure 19.3.
Engel, Christine (ed.) (with the collaboration of Eva Binder, Oksana Bulgakova, Evgenij Margolit and Miroslava Segida), Geschichte des sowjetischen und russischen Films (Stuttgart and Weimar, 1999): figure 25.3 (photograph: Arkadi Koltsaty).
Ėygel, Isaak Yu, Boris Iofan (Moscow: Stroyizdat, 1978): figure 31.2.
Feuchtwanger, Lion, Moskau 1937 (Amsterdam, 1937), cover illustration from the first edition published by Querido Verlag: figure 5.2.
Gassner, Hubertus (ed.), Agitatsiia za schast'e: sovetskoe iskusstvo stalinskoi epokhi. Gosudarstvennyi russkii muzei Sankt-Peterburg: upravlenie kul'tury goroda Kassel dokumenta-Archiv (Bremen, 1994): figures 4.2 and 24.1.
General'nyi plan rekonstruktsii goroda Moskvy (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1936): figure 1.1.
Gershkovich, Evgeniia, and Evgeni Korneev (eds), Stalin’s Imperial Style (Moscow: Trefoil Press, 2006): figures 15.1, 15.2 and 18.1.
Groys, Boris, and Max Hollein (eds), Traumfabrik Kommunismus: Die visuelle Kultur der Stalinzeit / Dream Factory Communism: The Visual Culture of the Stalin Era (Ostfildern-Ruit, 2003): figures 2.1 and 34.1.
Guide to the City of Moscow: Handbook for Tourists, with Information on the City’s Past, Present & Future, Descriptions of its Museums and Points of Interest, including 6 Maps (Moscow: Cooperative Publishing Society for Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1937): figures 20.1 and 20.2.
Istochnik 5–6 (1998) (ed. Irina Kondakova): figure 22.1.
Istoriia Moskvy: s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei, Vol. 3: XX C (Moscow, 2000): figure 28.2.
Istoriia Moskvy, Vol. 6: Period postroien'ia sotsializma (1917g.–iiun' 1941g.), Book 2 (Moscow, 1959): figure 14.1.
Kaminskii, Iurii A., Kremlevskie perelety (Moscow: Zhurnalistskoe agentstvo Glasnost', 1998): figure 19.2.
Khram Khrista Spasitelia v Moskve: istoriia proektirovaniia i sozdaniia sobora stranitsy zhizni i gibeli 1813–1931 (Moscow, 1992): figures 38.1, 38.2 and 38.3.
Kovaleva, L. (ed.), Moskva (Moscow: Rabochaia Moskva, 1935): figures 2.2, 9.1, 27.1, 27.2 and 28.1.
Mil. Geo. Plan von Moskau: Verkehrsmittel 1:35 000. Anlage zu Militärgeographischen Angaben über das Europaische Rußland, Mappe H: Moskau. Sonderausgabe VII. 1941. Nur für den Dienstgebrauch!, Reichsamt für Wehrgeographie, Moscow 1942 (extract): figure 37.1.
Ogonek no. 11 (1936): figure 31.1.
Il Palazzo Italiano di Soviet: Italianskii Dvorets Sovetov, catalogue from the Schusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow, 15 December 2006–20 February 2007: figure 26.2.
Pravda, 26 August 1936: figure 4.1.
Pravda, 9 January 1937: figure 5.1.
Pravda, 31 January 1937: figure 8.2.
Pravda, 19 February 1937: figure 10.1.
Pravda, 21 December 1937: figure 35.1.
Revels, Antonina, Riadom s Utësovym (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1995): figures 25.2 and 29.1.
Alexander Vatlin and Larissa Malaschenko (eds), Schweinefuchs und das Schwert der Revolution: Die bolschewistisiche Führung karikiert sich selbst (Munich: Verlag Antje Kunstmann, 2007), pp. 208 and 212: figures 11.1 and 11.2.
Rossiia, 20 vek: istoriia strany v plakate (Moscow, 2000), p. 115: figure 6.1.
Rundschau: Über Politik, Wirtschaft und Arbeiterbewegung 6/46 (1937) [special issue: ‘20 Jahre Sowjetmacht’]: figure 23.1.
Service, Robert, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2005): figure 36.2.
SSSR na stroike no. 2 (1934): figure 32.1.
SSSR na stroike no. 8 (1937): figures 21.1 and 21.2.
SSSR na stroike no. 1 (1938): figure 25.1.
SSSR na stroike no. 7 (1938): figure 8.1.
SSSR na stroike no. 8 (1938): figure 29.2.
SSSR na stroike no. 8 (1939): figures 16.1 and 30.2.
SSSR na stroike 1930–1949: illiustrirovannyi zhurnal novogo tipa (Moscow, 2006): figure 19.1.
Urussowa, Janina, Das neue Moskau: Die Stadt der Sowjets im Film 1917– 1941 (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2004): figure 2.3.
Vsia Moskva: adresno-spravochnaia kniga na 1936g (Moscow, 1936): figure 3.1.
Vystavochnye ansambli SSSR, 1920–1930-e gody: materialy i dokumenty (Moscow, 2006): figure 12.1.
Reprinted material from The Master and Margarita © The Estate of Mikhail Bulgakov. Translation by Michael Glenny, published by The Harvill Press. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.
Reprinted material from David L. Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929-1941. Copyright © 1994 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.
Reprinted material from The Disappearance by Yuri Trifonov, translated by David Lowe. Copyright © 1991 by Ardis Publishers / The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers,
Inc. New York, NY. All rights reserved.
We are very grateful to the University of Chicago Press, Aufbau Verlag and Yale University Press for permission to reprint material within this volume.
Translator’s Note
Transliterating Russian names and words is always a sensitive matter. In this book I have used a modified version of the Library of Congress system. Even so, although I have aimed at a certain consistency, I have not achieved this throughout. To quote Nicholas de Lange, a translator from a different language, ‘I have somet
imes surrendered to the claims of familiar usage.’ Thus ‘Gorki’ has been rendered as ‘Gorky’ and ‘Ezhov’ as ‘Yezhov’. I am most grateful to Anna Zaranko for going through the entire text and ensuring a uniform practice. The challenge posed by a German text so profoundly permeated by Russian terms and references is one I would not have been able to meet without the efforts of my wife Krystyna Livingstone, who went beyond the call of duty in reading through the entire text and painstakingly correcting my somewhat amateurish renderings. I am deeply grateful for her help in this and for rectifying countless other slips and errors. However, her contribution went well beyond correcting my mistakes and the collaboration gradually developed into a joint venture. Karl Schlögel’s German text is steeped in both traditional Russian culture and the Russia of the Soviet era. Russian resonances and echoes that might easily be overlooked pervade the entire book. As a translator in her own right, Krystyna was better able than I to respond to a myriad of almost subliminal meanings and bring them to the surface. I am greatly in her debt.
Rodney Livingstone
Southampton, April 2012
Introduction
Introductions are opening statements, not summaries or anticipations of what is to come. ‘Moscow, 1937’ is a historical symbol in Kant’s sense, a code word for one of the greatest historical catastrophes of the twentieth century. In the minds of millions of Soviet citizens the ‘accursed year 1937’ was a synonym for countless human tragedies. 1937 and 1938 are significant death dates. Human lives were abruptly cut short in 1937.1 It sent shock waves through the entire nation that could be felt far beyond its frontiers. In a single year some 2 million people were arrested, approaching 700,000 were murdered and almost 1.3 million were deported to camps and labour colonies. That was a hitherto inconceivable increase in suffering even in a country that had already experienced huge losses of life. In the First World War and the subsequent Civil War, Russia had lost around 15 million people and up to another 8 million from starvation arising from the collectivization process. But the numbers of those arrested, sentenced and shot in 1937–8 represented a quantum leap, an excess piled on excess.2
What makes the year 1937 so terrible, however, is not merely the number of victims. Few of those who were persecuted and killed knew why they had been singled out for this fate. The allegations and accusations were incredible and fantastic, and even more fantastic was the fact that the accused repeated and reproduced them in their confessions. This was the case with prominent revolutionary leaders, statesmen and diplomats known the world over, as well as technical experts and managers sorely needed by the country to help with reconstruction. They were all supposed to have conspired to organize uprisings and assassinations, built up spy networks and been involved in wrecking activities in factories, mines or research institutes. But, within a short time, those who had carried out the sentences found themselves in the dock and were transformed from active participants into victims. The central question that scholars have focused on to this day, and will probably continue to focus on, is why all these events took place, what was their underlying rationale.3 But in the past attention has concentrated on the trials of the prominent leaders belonging to the ‘old guard’, whereas now, ever since the publication of the documents relating to the so-called mass operations during 1937 and 1938, it has become evident that the Great Terror was directed primarily against ordinary people who did not belong to the Party, but who were singled out on the basis of social and ethnic criteria and systematically butchered.4
Since then, an enormous and, indeed an almost overwhelming, number of studies has appeared on this subject.5 Vast resources have become available since the demise of the Soviet Union and the resultant opening of the archives, and these have made it possible to reconstruct the course of events on new foundations. The documents and files of major government and Party authorities have been opened to researchers, so that internal debates and records of opinion-forming and decision-making processes can be reconstructed. Whereas previously we were forced to rely on estimates and guesswork, statistics kept by individual authorities now allow us to make more accurate calculations. Comprehensive source materials permit us to analyse the national mood, the perceptions of Party or government agencies, and methods used to resolve conflicts between the centre and the provinces.6 Fundamental studies of the functioning of important administrative authorities have been published.7 Last, but by no means least, the names, numbers and life stories of hundreds of thousands of victims have been traced, documented and published.8
Research on the history of ‘Stalinism as a civilization’ has made great strides, thanks above all to the opening up of new sources: memoirs, diaries, films, and works on iconography and architecture.9 However many spectacular documents are still to emerge – and some are certain to make their appearance in one context or another – they are unlikely to change the main thrust of the discoveries brought to light by the ‘archival revolution’ up to now. The sources that have been edited in recent years will keep a whole generation of historians busy.
The basic idea of the present work is quite straightforward. It sets out to bring together whatever records should have belonged together from the standpoint of history and life experience but which have been separated by the demands of the division of labour operating in historical research. My starting point is not yet another new thesis about the nature or dynamics of ‘Stalinism’, but an attempt to capture, as in a prism, the moment, the constellation, that contemporary witnesses to the events of the time always deemed ‘historically significant’. For this purpose it was necessary to research and reconstruct events as and where they happened. Taken together, these events constitute the nodal point that brings all the threads together, the fissures opening up where the lines of development break off and the constellation in which mighty tensions are released. This procedure is in conformity with the classical unities of time, place and action. Events are reconstructed in the order in which they took place and the space in which they were enacted. History ‘takes place’ not simply in time, not merely as a sequence of events unfolding in turn, but in a specific space, a locality. Everything that happened in Moscow in 1937 was acted out on a very narrow stage, frequently not just within a short space of time but also in one and the same place. The historical location, time and action all belong together, and historiography must follow suit and bring together once more ‘what fashion had kept asunder’. This gives rise to a time–space continuum that best corresponds to the historical reality.10 It makes possible the writing of history as synchronous history.
In order to be able to think of place, time and action together and to present them as such, Mikhail Bakhtin coined the term chronotope. Bakhtin, incidentally, lived close to Moscow in 1937 and was himself an observer of the events described here.11
Such a synchronous history presents great problems, but more importantly it also offers great benefits for whose sake it is worth taking almost any risk. Its greatest advantage lies in the tacit coercion involved in tying events down to a concrete location. A history that is tied to a particular time or space implicitly acknowledges the synchronicity of the non-synchronous, the coexistence and co-presence of the disparate. The location guarantees complexity. The stereoscopic all-round view is designed to bring events together; it is better suited to the disparate nature of the world than is a strenuous, concentrated tunnel vision. By taking in everything ‘at a glance’, it grasps the relationships that elude a more specialized but also more limited mode of perception. An all-round view sensitive to time and space sets relationships in motion that are paralysed by a more concentrated method which focuses on particular points. However, for a period such as the 1930s, which is itself an epoch of extremes encapsulated within an age of extremes, the idea of a histoire totale is the most appropriate approach, even if it is never fully attainable. The principal effort that has to be invested in such a history aspires to discover a way, a form, in which extremes can be contemplated simultaneousl
y. Mastering the difficulties inherent in that effort is a problem of far greater magnitude than any difficulties thrown up by the source materials. The greatest challenge stems not from the absence of sources, but in most cases from their overwhelming plenitude and their inexhaustible profusion.
We have to make use of everything that helps us, as the products of a later generation, to enter into a world from which we are excluded in the nature of the case and the direct experience of which we have been spared. Our view is that there is no set of sources, no genre and no perspective that might not enable us to shed light where previously darkness had reigned. The available sources might include decrees, diaries, newspaper articles and town plans; exhibition guides might be as illuminating as reports of arrests or records of executions. No perspective, no angle of perception is to be excluded. We should ignore the viewpoint of neither the foreign tourist nor that of the agricultural migrant escaping to the city, neither the schoolchild looking forward to the start of the new term, the newspaper reader tackling his crossword puzzle nor the later confession of a ‘special duties officer’. Herodotus is still the best teacher when it comes to grasping the nature of complex experiences.
But of itself this does not offer much assistance in helping us to understand what a ‘synchronous narrative’ might look like. In the present case, some methods and models are more obvious than others. I have in mind here Walter Benjamin’s ‘flâneur’, Sergei Eisenstein’s aesthetics and his use of montage, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope. What we can learn from Benjamin is not only what history can achieve by way of a ‘materialist physiognomy’ but also how productive flânerie can be as a mode of knowledge. Nevertheless, in writing this book we have also been forced to recognize that, in the Moscow of the 1930s, Benjamin’s flâneur would have been something of an anachronism. He would scarcely have been able to move in the squares with their mass parades, let alone stroll freely beneath the gaze of the secret policemen assigned to keep an eye on him. Sergei Eisenstein’s aesthetics and techniques, like film in general, seem best suited to providing a form able to grasp the ruptures and dis-continuities, the synchronicity of the non-synchronous, and translate them into narrative terms. A further factor is that Eisenstein himself was commissioned to produce the jubilee film for the year 1937. His designs and his script might well have formed the basis for a historical narrative. But setting aside the fact that Eisenstein failed to complete this project – and likewise failed in his subsequent attempt to commemorate the 800th anniversary of the founding of the city of Moscow – his failure may have had intrinsic, methodological reasons. 1937 was a year in which conflicts came to a head and exploded, and there was a sudden end to life stories that have to be retold as stories, rather than simply being ‘inserted’ into a mosaic like atoms or fragments. Paradoxical though it sounds, montage seems to be ‘insufficiently complex’ in this of all situations.12
Moscow, 1937 Page 2
